This War of Mine is a gut-wrenching look at survival on the sidelines of war.

You could be forgiven if at first glance you mistook This War of Mine for a dystopian zombie apocalypse game.

It fits all of the trappings of the zombie genre, splitting your actions between scavenging for supplies and fortifying a dilapidated home base with scarce resources and only a fragile band of refugees at your command.

Except instead of the fantastical horror of the living dead, the catalyst for the game's societal collapse is rooted in the very real horrors of an urban war zone.

11 Bit Studios

It is a unique approach for a war game, highlighting the often ignored civilian struggle to survive rather than romanticising soldiers on the front line.

Starting with a group of three randomly assigned refugees, you are unceremoniously dropped into the midst of a war and simply told to survive without any indication of how to go about doing that.

Slowly, as supplies dwindle and survival grows dire with the onset of winter, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between those bandits and your own actions.

With minimal tutorials, it can be disorienting at first to figure out how to scavenge for supplies, or how to craft tools, build furniture and cook food with those supplies.

Yes, this is the kind of game where you will almost assuredly make grave mistakes during your first several attempts as you use trial and error to figure out things like which tools are actually helpful and how long your survivors can actually survive without food.

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11 Bit Studios

It can be disorienting, but purposefully so to replicate civilians who are thrust into unfamiliar circumstances from the war.

Each survivor also brings with him or her a unique trait from their pre-war life. A former chef or mechanic can get more out of your resources when cooking or crafting tools, while others bring skills that can help alleviate depression, get better barter rates from friendly survivors or simply run faster for a better chance to escape from bandits.

During the day your group is confined to their safe house thanks to the threat of sniper fire outside, but at night you can send one survivor out to scavenge supplies from the surrounding city.

While the resource management of the safe house feels more like a real-time strategy game, controlling a single survivor on a supply run turns This War of Mine into a tense stealth game.

11 Bit Studios

Your vision is restricted to the survivor's line of sight, so even though you can see a side-scrolling cross-section of a building, any walls or doors obscuring your view will blur out the detail from any room your survivor can't directly see.

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Sound also plays a huge role, with every action your survivor and anyone else in the vicinity makes leaving a visible ripple, indicating how far the sound travelled.

It is a technique for stealth gameplay that previously worked fantastically in Klei's Mark of the Ninja, and when applied to This War of Mine's slower, more methodical pace, it creates a wonderfully tense atmosphere as you pray your survivor finishes rummaging through a cabinet while watching the sound of bandit footsteps get closer on the other side of an unlocked door.

11 Bit Studios

You will see very little of the unspecified war that rages through the nondescript, vaguely Eastern European city where the game takes place.

All you see is the aftermath of war, and the upheaval it leaves behind. In the war's wake, groups of armed bandits roam the city, scavenging supplies from the mortared buildings still standing and terrorising any civilians who haven't evacuated the city.

Slowly, as supplies dwindle and survival grows dire with the onset of winter, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between those bandits and your own actions.

Where This War of Mine becomes particularly interesting is in how it treats the morality of survival.

11 Bit Studios

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As civilians, each person in your band of refugees has a fairly naive moral compass.

Acts like stealing supplies from other refugee groups or actually killing someone, even in self-defence, can weigh heavily on your survivors to the point of depression.

Depressed survivors are slower to react to your commands, sometimes giving up on a task midway through. Push them too far and the depression can become paralysing - or even suicidal.

During one playthrough I lost a refugee during a midnight scavenging run, along with the group's only gun and all of its ammo.

Back at the safe house my refugees were relying on the supplies from that trip, with the two remaining survivors severely sick and on the verge of starvation.

But without a weapon the refugees had no chance of surviving a supply run the next night, except for at one location on the map: a small cottage at the edge of town where an elderly couple lived seemingly untouched by the war.

I had avoided the cottage until then, but in my desperation even I was shocked at how quickly my morals crumbled and watched in horror as the elderly couple ran and hid in fear while my limping, half-crazed survivor stumbled through their home brandishing a kitchen knife and leaving with as much canned food and medicine as he could carry.

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The guilt drove that survivor to hang himself in the morning, while his partner was so traumatised she could only rock back and forth in the foetal position and succumbed to starvation the next day.

11 Bit Studios

However, just as the aftermath of war can bring out the worst in people, it can also bring out the best in them.

Not everyone you encounter will be hostile, with some survivors offering supplies to barter and neighbouring groups of refugees asking for help and offering their own in kind.

During another playthrough I entered the winter months with a single survivor who was unable to effectively go on supply runs due to a severe wound she sustained earlier without any bandages to help it heal.

She was all but done for when a knock came at the door. A neighbour was stopping by to offer bundles of food as repayment for help I had given him weeks earlier. The next day another neighbour stopped by bringing a huge stack of fire wood.

That last refugee's wounds eventually got the better of her, but she survived a whole week longer than she should have thanks to the generosity of strangers. A brief epilogue then informed me that her diaries were found after the war and published to later become an international best-selling novel.

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There doesn't seem to be much hope for survival if you play This War of Mine as completely morally good or completely bad.

Whether it is showing the harsh lengths people go to to survive or the indomitable generosity born from hardship, the common thread tying This War of Mine together is that it remains a gut-wrenching experience.

Instead, it's a game about accepting that there will be unavoidable actions you regret, and striving to find balance in the shades of gray morality so that you can have the supplies to survive both mentally and physically.

Whether it is showing the harsh lengths people go to to survive or the indomitable generosity born from hardship, the common thread tying This War of Mine together is that it remains a gut-wrenching experience.

11 Bit Studios

In between those moments when the game delivers an emotional punch it becomes an anxiety simulator, inducing panic when, for example, a bandit raid robs you of your food and firewood just as the winter snow begins to fall.

This War of Mine creates an oppressively bleak landscape, but with just enough humanity shining through that you want to keep digging to find and hold onto that source of light.

That earnest human touch keeps This War of Mine compelling even when you mess up and the rubble all comes tumbling down around you, leaving you just enough hope for the next attempt that you'll dive back in and endure it all again.

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